The Linux 3.13 kernel that will be released in the very near future is very
worth the upgrade if you are a RadeonSI user -- in particular, the Radeon HD 7000
series GPUs and newer on the Gallium3D Linux graphics driver -- but other open-source graphics driver users as well may also
see nice improvements in the new kernel release. Here's some benchmarks
showing off the gains found with the Linux 3.13 kernel for Radeon HD and R9 graphics
cards.

I'm in the process of publishing a new set of thorough benchmarks comparing
the "out of the box" Ubuntu 13.10 performance to using Mesa 10.1-devel
(and other new packages via the
Oibaf PPA), the Mesa 10.1-devel Git state and then when upgrading to the latest
Linux kernel, and lastly comparing these "best possible" open-source
driver performance numbers against the closed-source AMD Catalyst driver. This
is being done for two articles to look at the Radeon HD 5000/6000 performance
with the "R600 Gallium3D" driver and then with the "RadeonSI"
Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards and newer. Multiple
graphics cards are being tested for each of the series. Those results should come
out next week.

The Linux
3.13 kernel yields a big difference for RadeonSI users especially so I decided
to share some early numbers this weekend due to the imminent release of Linux
3.13. The 3.13 is a big win for newer AMD graphics processors due to enabling
DPM by default and other power management improvements. It's been possible
on the 3.11/3.12 kernels to manually enable DPM for Radeon GPUs, but with Linux
3.13 most bugs should now be fixed and it's turned on by default. For higher-end
GPUs this allows the Radeon DRM driver to dynamically re-clock to its highest
power state while down-clocking when idling to save power and reduce heat output:
Radeon DPM is fantastic
for the open-source driver.

There's also various other open-source Radeon driver improvements found in
the Linux 3.13 kernel like HDMI audio support is turned on by default. Plus there's a huge assortment
of other Linux
3.13 new features and improvements.

Let's see what it means for the latest Radeon graphics cards when upgrading
from Linux 3.12 to 3.13...

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